Yet Another Year In America February 4, 2010

[koganbot]

Hallelujah I'm a bore, or the Top 40 is, anyway, with a Haiti charity knock-off and a country disappointment the only newcomers on an already snoozing chart.

Justin Timberlake & Matt Morris ft. Charlie Sexton "Hallelujah": I have nothing in principle against thousands upon thousands of versions of this any more than I think there shouldn't be thousands and thousands of attempts at Beethoven's Fifth, and this track's doing its job of raising moolah for people who need it. Mike Barthel's already been excellent at pointing out "Hallelujah"'s flexibility but also how so many covers of it nonetheless become major exercises in point missing, taking a little song that's definitely funny but can also be worked for despair as it walks many and varied lines between reverence and irreverence and inflating it into/reducing it to a nebulously pretty evoker of any sorrowful old this or that; Timberlake and co. make it into a nebulous success at illiciting nonnebulous money for the desperate; as sound, it's slow and pretty and reverent, listenable for a couple of spins. NO TICK.

Jason Aldean "The Truth": This is a wasted opportunity from a couple of good writers (Ashley Monroe, who's written some terrific stuff for herself; and Brett James, who's got scores of credits including Carrie Underwood's great "Jesus Take The Wheel"), wasted 'cause, though Aldean's got a good basic twang, he's never evoked a damn thing in me; and because the lyrics botch what's actually a great idea: lovesick narrator drops out of sight, asks the object of his thwarted affections to come up with lies rather than tell the world he's still hung up on her, and the cover stories he suggests get progressively less and less respectable. "Tell 'em I went to visit friends" gives way to "tell 'em I'm out in Vegas, blowing every dollar I ever made." But they could have really gone somewhere with it, made the stories ever more outlandish and disreputable to show that virtually anything is better than admitting he's still in love. In place of that lame Vegas cliché, why not say he's out roaming the boonies with some traveling rep theater playing the lead role in an all-male staging of Tess Of The D'Urbervilles? BORDERLINE NONTICK. [EDIT: But on Rolling Country Chuck's got a good write-up of why he loves this song, so I may give this more listens to see if it can reach me.]

Speaking of Hope For Haiti, down at #72 Taylor Swift's Better Than Ezra cover is painfully out-of-tune, though the pitch problem is the musicians' at least as much as Taylor's; I seem to be erratic as to when pitch problems bother me. Taylor herself is erratic: Cis reported last year that Taylor's London show was completely in tune, and Himes wrote in his year-end essay that he'd witnessed her being pitch perfect. Maybe for all of Taylor's apparent poise, she actually chokes in the face of a national TV audience. (But my own pitch problems never have anything to do with choking or not, from what I can tell.)

Comments

[koganbot]

Don't know if dubdobdee is back in Internet Town yet; would hope he'd pop in to make an argument about money's being nebulous too.

[koganbot]

Down in Barthel's comment thread, skyecaptain says, "no good pop song has ever contained the phrase 'patriarchal hegemony,' but 'Stupid Girls' is a good pop song with piss poor politics." Of course, he's referring to Pink's "Stupid Girls," but - of course - I misread and thought he was referring to the Stones' "Stupid Girl," and I was going "Hmmmm, no, the politics in 'Stupid Girl' are only incipient, but they're not piss poor and could go in a number of directions, including feminist, and for Jagger the issue clearly wasn't 'this is how women are and this is the way things are,' since he was continually jabbing his poker at the way things seem to be, stirring the coals." Then, when Mike responded to Dave's point by saying "The outright feminism of 'Stupid Girls' is expressed so stupidly that I think it makes outright feminism look a little stupid, even though obvs. it's not," I was going, "Wait, you're going way too far to cast the Stones as outright feminists, even if they were taking male-female relations and the love song to be very problematic and being rather incendiary in pushing the problems." Then I went, "Doh! He's talking about the Pink song."

I recommend that you click the link and read every word of Mike's essay and its afterword, and then the entire discussion between Dave and Mike (and there's lots of interesting stuff after, too, including the full text of a sermon based on the song).

[koganbot]

Wait, you're going way too far to cast the Stones as outright feminists, even if they were taking male-female relations and the love song to be very problematic and being rather incendiary in pushing the problems.

Make it "and WERE being rather incendiary" - it is the Stones, not the love song, that were being incendiary (however, the Stones' love songs tended to be incendiary, "love song" meaning any romance songs, whether loving or not).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I like that phrase, "incipiently political" -- I think what I was struggling with in that convo was the idea that politics tends to exist in the world in which you can use the politics (in my Ramones T-shirt example), and putting a focus on the explicit (lyrical) statement of a pop song seems like a bad place to designate "source of politics" when there's so much that's political happening around the music, sometimes unavoidably. Lots of music is begging for a political conversation, whether the lyrics themselves are begging for it or if it's just that the context in which the music is happening seems politically charged. Anywhere there's a major audience division, you're probably going to run into some potent politics.

Although maybe not -- I wouldn't claim that most people who are writing about their displeasure with Taylor Swift's "innocence shtick" have some cogent underlying politics to this position, even if it might express itself "politically." Their politics is more social hierarchy -- Taylor Swift is filling the role of The Kind of Person We Should Not Reward [rather than "hate," I think most of the conversation hinges on Taylor not being deserving of so much attention], therefore all characteristics she seems to exhibit, whether these are verifiable or not, become what we mean when we use that role -- the role itself pre-dates what traits constitute the role, which shift so that we can keep using the role. And that role, of course, is ______.

Well, the role says that pop culture is either (1) a reflection of "everyone," meaning that if you don't like that reflection it's either reflecting badly on you (not bloody likely) or not everyone else (bingo); or (2) cynically calculated to be shoved down our throats whether we "really" like it or not, hence all claims of enjoyment can be categorized as naive or outright lying. In (1) the problem seems often to be that the "reflection" happens to miraculously sync with our own projected fears and resentments; it's not something that can be understood differently with an eye to how it might reflect something good, or even accurate. Rather it's designed, like a funhouse mirror, to distort everything grotesquely. Those seeking the worst traits of their country (or whatever) revealed see it, just as someone with a particular body image might be drawn to the ways in which a mirror distorts that particular aspect of them but not others (I say this as someone who doesn't like seeing his jaw ballooned artificially in automatic hand dryers).

In (2) we're just giving way too much credit to the Machine and its Machinations (aside: if Emily ever formed a band, it should be called Robota Bot and the Machinations) -- if Taylor Swift was a "calculated" image, what the hell was she calculated to do? I still can't figure out WTF she's doing, let alone what she's doing right.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

that should be "either reflecting badly on you or ON everyone else," not "not"

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

and that's "body image hang-up."